DMT

Dr. Pim van Lommel graduated from the Medical School of Utrecht University, Netherlands, has become a cardiologist since 1976, and has worked in the Rijnstate Hospital for 26 years. It was in 1986 that he started studying “near-death experiences” in patients who survived a cardiac arrest, and has studied over 500 cases ever since.
In 1988, he co-founded the Merkawah Foundation, IANDS (the International Association of Near-Death Studies) in the Netherlands. In 2001, Dr. van Lommel and others published their Dutch study in the reputable medical journal “The Lancet”. In 2005, he was granted the ‘Bruce Greyson Research Award’ on behalf of the International Association for Near-Death Studies. In September 2006, the President of India, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, awarded him the ‘Life Time Achievement Award’ at the World Congress on Clinical and Preventive Cardiology in New Delhi, for the recognition of his great contributions. In 2007, he published his bestseller book ‘Eindeloos Bewustzijn’ (Endless Consciousness) in Dutch in the Netherlands. He has also authored chapters in several books and published articles on “near-death experiences”.

Synopsis of Talk

As the first medical practitioner to have undertaken a full and systematic study of “near-death experiences” (NDEs), he found it ethically untenable not to investigate the phenomenon under the controlled conditions of a cluster of hospitals with medically trained staff. For more than twenty years, he has systematically studied near-death experiences in a wide variety of patients who had survived a cardiac arrest, encountering consistent reports of full cardiac arrest coincident with clear consciousness with full cognitive functions, emotions, self-identity, and sometimes memories from childhood and even (non-sensory) perception outside their lifeless bodies and beyond the dimensions of physical time and space.

In 2001, he and his fellow researchers published the results of the first scientifically rigorous longitudinal study of near-death experiences in “The Lancet”, challenging the foundations of neurological theory and causing an international sensation in the medical community. In four prospective studies with a total of 562 survivors of cardiac arrest, between 11% and 18% of the patients reported a NDE, and in these studies it could not be shown that physiological, psychological, pharmacological, or demographic factors could account for the cause and contents of these experiences. Based on such research, van Lommel asserts that the prevailing idea of most physicians and neuroscientists that the brain entirely encompasses consciousness does not account for the observed phenomena, because there are good reasons to assume that our consciousness does not always coincide with the functioning of our brain: enhanced consciousness can sometimes be experienced separately from the body.

The conclusions of these scientific studies on NDE may have practical implications for the care for comatose or dying patients, euthanasia, and the removal of organs for transplantation from a person in the dying process with a diagnosis of brain death, yet with a still-beating heart in a warm body. Health care practitioners of all kinds, along with terminal patients and their families, have been shown to benefit from an awareness of the extraordinary experiences that may occur during a period of clinical death, or coma, and even after death.

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